fear of life
by Canadino
Summary: Being afraid of living never solved anything either. AkaMido, sequel to fear of death


**Disclaimer: The only thing I own is the story idea and only some of the witty remarks. I own so little; so please don't steal.**

Background music: -

[=]

It comes out of seemingly nowhere when Midorima makes the silent decision to stop killing him. Akashi lies there, flushed and satisfied and thinking – about the way he wants to throw up when he feels his guts spill out of his abdomen or the shudder his entire body makes when Midorima twists the knife that spears into his heart – but Midorima makes no movement for a knife, simply rolls onto the tarp beneath them sticking to their skin with sweat and says nothing. When Akashi voices his expectation, Midorima just shakes his head. When he keeps pushing the issue, Midorima gets up off the bed and walks out of the room. Akashi spends the rest of the night carving intricate patterns on his skin and falls asleep in his own blood. He wakes up the next morning to find soft sheets under himself and there is no trace of blood to be found.

He thinks it's an isolated situation and knows Midorima to be temperamental enough to resist him once or twice but when weeks pass and Midorima refuses to cut him up at any opportunity, turning away and leaving the room when Akashi presses the blade into his hands, Akashi suspects he has a problem.

Akashi comes to the church one weekend after services where Midorima plays piano for the parish and sits next to him on the bench. Something makes him leave a bit of space for apprehension. Midorima does not stop playing the piece at hand although the church is deserted.

"Are you upset with me?" Akashi asks when Midorima finishes.

"Is that the only conclusion you can come up with as to why I've stopped hurting you?"

Akashi stares at the beautiful white piano keys. "I can see no other reason as to why you refuse me now."

Midorima folds his hands and keeps them in his lap. He takes off the tape on his fingers for church, the tape that keeps his fingers sensitive and able to feel the slightest bit of medical malady at the hospital. He never tells Akashi, but Akashi knows Midorima is most promising intern out of the batch fresh out of medical school. "I love you," he says finally, and Akashi drags his eyes away from the polished keys to look Midorima in the eyes. "So while I do trust you and would like to acquiesce to your every whim, it hurts me to carve you up."

"You know my body puts itself back together in the end."

"Yes, but you still feel pain, don't you." It's the truth neither of them wishes to vocalize, because it stirs up a memory of Akashi crying out, tears streaming down his face with a look of utter petition when Midorima once cut through a certain nerve. It's a spot that he refuses to touch ever since. "It's natural to want the one you love never to hurt. I don't know what you gain from having me carve at you, but I want no more of it."

Akashi says nothing.

"To think that you can associate me with someone who makes you happy and someone who hurts you; you can't truly love someone like that." Midorima's eyes are on him now but Akashi, strong as he is, doesn't think he can match up to them at the moment. "I don't know why you want that, but I can't be comfortable knowing I antagonize myself to you even if you don't admit it. Please understand my feelings."

"Yes, of course. Shall we go out to brunch now that you're finished playing for services?"

Midorima shakes his head. "I don't think so."

[=]

Midorima notices first the time he goes to the kitchen to get water and finds Akashi standing at the counter, his arm on the chopping board and his hand wrapped around the handle of the cleaver. Before he can even blink, Akashi proves himself to be adept at sudden movements and severs his hand from his arm like a simple piece of meat.

"Akashi," Midorima says, his voice coming from his loud and breathless from shock.

"Relax," Akashi dismisses, placing the bloody cleaver down into the sink and collecting his still-warm severed hand. "I already tried it with my fingers; I don't grow flesh and bone where it isn't any in the first place, but look." He holds his hand up to the bloody stump and Midorima watches with grotesque fascination as the skin stitches itself back together. Akashi wiggles his bloody fingers around. "Isn't it amazing?"

Midorima stumbles into the fridge and grips the door handle. He isn't squeamish at blood – he's a doctor, after all – but he feels suddenly so light-headed. Akashi washes his arm in the sink, the blood swirling down the drain. Midorima no longer wants water.

"Don't look like that," Akashi admonishes, drying his hands. "You've lost all color in your face."

"I," Midorima manages, with little luck afterwards.

[=]

They don't go out often to places like this, but they have a fight beforehand and Midorima follows Akashi to the thunderous, dark, damp nightclub and loses him. He watches Akashi dance out of his reach, catching a glimpse of him grinding up against a stranger, and the thick bass hurts his temples as he hears Akashi's voice in his mind, the pointed words thrown at him before, _you wouldn't know what's best for me, you, who don't know anything about me_. He finds Akashi finally at the foot of a long flight of stairs, body angled clearly indicating that he had thrown himself down the stairs with all purpose to bruise and break his neck. It's dark and crowded enough that he can pretend he is a drunkard with extraordinary luck. Midorima hears him laugh and watches him for a moment, rooted at the top of the stairs.

It's a miracle no one has trampled him. Midorima hoists him up gently, careful not to suddenly shift his neck, and smells a faint whiff of vodka tonic on Akashi's breath. "Take me home and do whatever nasty thing you want to do to me," Akashi yells in his ear because the music is deafening. Midorima wonders if Akashi knows it's him he's talking to or what if suppose someone else had come to help him. Akashi begins kissing a wet line up his neck, and Midorima feels the bones in Akashi's neck shift under his fingers.

They don't make it home and Midorima fucks him in the last stall of the men's bathroom with the flickering light bulb, Akashi's fingernails scraping lines in the grime of the wall of the stall, gasping with each thrust. The bass sounds dull behind thick walls. The floor is filthy and wet.

Akashi wakes up the next morning and Midorima can see the relief, clear as day, in his eyes that they wake up next to each other. Akashi apologizes by threading his fingers into Midorima's bedhead affectionately. "I don't know what's best for you," Midorima admits.

"You know good enough," Akashi assures him.

[=]

Midorima remembers Akashi laughing the first time they fully inspect the fridge in their apartment. "The freezer is absolutely ridiculous," he said, laughing so hard he holds his hands up to his mouth to keep himself looking presentable. "It's so big you could hold several baby pigs or enough ice cream to make a toddler diabetic." They never freeze enough food to fully utilize the freezer space. Midorima thinks Akashi has gone out for a walk and begins reading in the living room when the freezer door opens and Akashi clamors out, skin blue and frost on his lips.

"I think my heart stopped once," Akashi says. Even his eyes take on a faint blue tint. Midorima feels cold just looking at him. He rushes to get all the fleece blankets they own and wrap them around Akashi. He wraps his arms tight around Akashi to thaw him out, feeling a chill in his elbows.

Soon, Akashi's hair is dripping and he regains enough feeling to shiver violently. Warming up is always painful.

"You're frightening me," Midorima murmurs.

"There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday," Akashi recites, "and the knife not carve, but enter; pure and clean as the cry of a baby; and the universe slide from my side."

"I'll call the landlord to shut off the gas," Midorima promises.

"I'll walk into the Thames instead with rocks in my pockets," Akashi laughs.

[=]

Akashi is too far from the Thames River to walk there but Midorima finds him in the nearby river at five in the evening, floating on by peacefully like a Japanese Ophelia. His hair is wet and his skin shows signs of asphyxiation, but he is smiling. "The thing about never dying is," he says, when he notices Midorima walking on the shore alongside him, "that my lungs dispel water out of their own accord. But if I'm constantly under water, I can drown an infinite amount of times. But I got tired of that, so I took the weights off."

"You'll catch a cold if you stay in the water," Midorima says instead.

"No, I won't," Akashi says, and they both know this as true. Midorima has never seen Akashi in anything other than a clean bill of health. As if to prove this, Akashi only leaves the water when it begins to get chilly and makes a show of meandering to the car in the cold. He wakes up the next morning feeling fine as day.

[=]

"Why are you doing this?" Midorima demands when he catches Akashi hanging from a mess of cable around his neck in their bedroom. Akashi looks like a demented marionette, a chair lying haphazardly a few inches from his feet. Akashi coughs and loosens the taunt line from his neck. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"If I wanted to tell you something, I would have said it clearly," Akashi insists, fixing the chair upright again.

"I never lie to you. Don't try and feed me something I know is blatantly wrong."

"Of course you never lie to me. You can't." Akashi's eyes flash, red and gold.

"I wish you'd do the same and tell me the truth," Midorima says bitterly. Akashi looks at him and sets up the chair again. Midorima's disappointment reminds him of his father when he kicks the chair away again.

[=]

The secret behind Akashi's suicides is that whenever he thinks of Midorima, he has an overwhelming urge to run and there is no way he can leave his body and escape. Before, whenever he was feeling especially fond of Midorima, he has Midorima remind him that he is nothing but someone who brings pain and discomfort. But now when Midorima hands him homemade tofu soup – and it is always too salty – Akashi feels his heart leap like a koi in a pond and nothing stops him. When Midorima's hand holds his, nothing squeezes the breath quite literally out of his body. When he thinks of Midorima whispering something sweet in his ear on their way home, Akashi lets two tablets of rat poison slide down his throat.

When he comes to, Midorima is sitting at his bedside looking utterly distraught. "You're going to kill me," he says immediately. "In fact, you're already killing me. I'm going to be dead soon and soon you'll have no one to torment."

"You can't die," Akashi tells him. "You won't be able to come back afterwards."

[=]

The ways he devises to die, he can't make them too ornate because he can't have the general public aware of his destructive tendencies nor his tendencies to walk away from these instances unscathed. He figures his purchases might make him public enemy number one if a murderer begins prowling the neighborhood, and he can't even be killed to clear his name. He thinks about how disgusting and filthy he'd feel if someone else used the rope and lighter fluid the cashier at the hardware store scans with clear apathy on him, how different their calloused and unfeeling hands would be against his skin instead of Midorima, who always killed him with the purest of intentions.

It hurts, obviously, when he soaks the rope in lighter fluid and soaks his clothes, steps into the bathtub and removes the shower curtain to save it, and lights himself on fire. The flames lick his skin, sharp stabs into his flesh, and he feels every cell char and smoke. He grits his teeth, as he does every time, to keep from crying out. Midorima shouldn't be home for a while. He doesn't want this attempt to be stopped from running its due course.

The thing is, he knows Midorima's dedication to him. He knows that Midorima has been with him through enough and puts up with all his shit that he doesn't fear anymore that he will wake up and realize he is in a relationship with a freak of nature and leave him for someone normal, ordinary, plain. He kills himself to drive out the next best fear, closes his eyes to the fire that is beginning to reach his hair, and lets the fire baptize him and consume his thoughts instead of the terrifying thought that he would watch, eternally preserved, as they lowered Midorima into the ground. He promised himself he would never love, but that was too late, so he'd promise never to love forever.

Midorima returns to an apartment smelling faintly of burned flesh. Their bathroom is surprisingly clean and devoid of anything particularly telling. Akashi has taken his things to the incinerator in the back of the apartment complex. "Did you kill yourself today?" he asks. Akashi ignores him and buries himself deeper into the couch.

[=]

When he was young, he accompanied his mother to one of her psychiatrist appointments because he had a piano recital immediately after that she wanted to attend, because he was playing one of her favorite songs and in the end, she really did love him as a mother even if she was distant all the time. He doesn't know if he can say the same for his father, who has never stopped putting money in his bank account even after he has run away from home and fallen off the radar.

"So Midorima tells me that you often have – uh – destructive thoughts."

"I'm not destructive because I'm unhappy," Akashi precludes irritably. The psychiatrist is a colleague of Midorima's who he introduces and then awkwardly takes his leave. It is a well-played maneuver because he barely sees it coming. At the most, he can give Midorima what he wants to hear. "It is possible I have father issues stemming from the fact that he was a man who thinks problems disappear when he keeps throwing money at them. I ran away when I was twenty so I didn't have to inherit his business and he hasn't tried to seek me out since." All this Midorima knows, so Akashi thinks little of the way the man scribbles all this down in his notepad. "Maybe I am unhappy."

"Oh?"

"I have a condition, see," Akashi says. "It's a condition that makes it so I shouldn't feel any strong feelings toward anything or anyone but I have now, and so I'm unhappy. It's a condition that would make anything I love unhappy and now I have gone ahead and perpetuated the whole thing. I've started something I can't finish, and that makes me unhappy." He's disgusted with himself for having said something so close to the truth and closes up. He doesn't even know what he means anyway. "You can tell Midorima that, if you want. I don't care."

"I'm sorry about today," Midorima whispers in his ear when they're making love later that night, Akashi breathing happily at the way Midorima holds him. They are quiet for a moment for a long kiss. "He thought you had some terminal disease and asked me why I would be so cruel as to remind you of something like that."

Akashi laughs softly. "It's ironic but a little true." He waits for Midorima to mention something else, the implications of the other things he's said but Midorima does no such thing and only makes him feel good.

Afterwards, Akashi is trembling, quickly thinking of the next way he can kill himself when he wakes himself up in the morning, but Midorima takes out a knife from the bedside table, one they have never cleaned out. For a moment, Akashi feels a flash of fear about the way Midorima is looming over him and he almost cries out, _no_. "I'm sorry, Akashi," Midorima murmurs. "I never – considered exactly how you felt, I mean. I couldn't understand the…life you lead, so I shouldn't have assumed. I thought you were testing me this entire time for some twisted assumption you had made about me but perhaps it was me who was wrong."

"You were never wrong," Akashi says, running a soothing hand down Midorima's thigh. "Go ahead."

[=]

The next morning, Akashi wakes up earlier than Midorima so he's still lying in a pool of congealing blood and has dried blood all over himself. He eases Midorima off the tarp and collects all four sides to bring to the bathroom to wash off. After he hangs the tarp off to dry, he washes the blood off himself.

Even with the blood off, his skin feels strangely rough and he thinks nothing of it until he dries himself off in the mirror and notices that the places that Midorima cut into the previous night has – though light and almost unnoticeable at first glance – scars stretching across.


End file.
